Planning Capital Cities

The right to the city

The right to the city is according to Lefebvre^19 the right to a transformed and
renewed urban life. Following Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, Harvey
starts with Park’s quotation that the city is the human’s most consistent and
most successful attempt to make the world according to the man’s wishes. But
if the city is the world which is created by humans, it is the world in which they
are henceforth condemned to live. Thus man is making the city remade himself,
indirectly, and without a clear understanding of the nature of his work.^20 Harvey
uses the quote to require the dependence of the city on what kind of people
we want to be, what kind of social relations we seek, what relations to nature
we cherish, what everyday life we want, what kinds of technologies we deem
appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold^21. His vision of the right to the city
refers to a commitment to some kind of shaping power over the processes of
urbanization and the ways cities are built and reshaped.^22

This is very important for the cities’ development because in the case of an
omission we obtaine the cities as beautiful, but fortified fragments, of gated
communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance.
This leads to a serious problem because it becomes harder to maintain the
ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging, already threatened by the
neoliberal ethic. And if they are neglected, that will undermine the foundation
of a positive city image. Considering this, the new role of urban design should
be treated with caution, because it implies bouts of urban restructuring through
“creative destruction”^23 , which almost always has a class dimension.

The city competitive identity project

In the context of the communication of traditional and contemporary values,
the city is primarily a phenomenon of identity in the domain of culture, whereas,
of course, the administrative, economic and touristic character belongs to this
domain. Accordingly, the identity is viewed as a project that has the pretension
to mark a group of people, in this case the citizens of a particular city.

Since the experience of spending has become a complex and emotional one
and since the global exchange of technology, capital and labour establishes
a real chance for “immaterial labour” and the intellectual capital to become
financially measurable resources, brands become phenomena of neoliberal
capitalism.^24 Thus city brands or their competitive identities may be not only a
source of identity rather than differentiation and identification, continuity and
collectivity.^25 The city competitive identity project must be conceived, designed
and implemented as an identity system that takes into account the tradition
of cultural heritage, natural beauty, current services and existing identities of
the actual residents of the city^26. Such an identity system forms a symbolic
communication program that is intended to reflect the entire community, but
accounts with individual identities as well.

Milena Vukmirović